He has a point there. However, in developing countries, if outcomes is almost equal, the losing side (say the one winning 49%) will cry foul. Just look at Kenya, and there won’t be peace.

Author: liaozixiansheng Date: 01-11-06 09:41

Quite often, one witnesses a situation where the population is neatly bifurcated into two opposing camps of roughly equal number.In such a scenario, a democratic method for the determination of a political outcome, would be moot. Outside influences then come into play and exert the final say on the outcome.

We know that there are no fair arbiters in this world; nobody without vested interests; nobody with the type of dispassionate goodness one would associate with a philosopher king or God of some sort.

What we have, instead, are endless lobbies and special interest groups all vying to garner some sort of advantage and exerting undue pressure on politicians. Sound decision making becomes paralyzed and the centre fails to hold.

Democracy, while not wholly reprehensible in itself, has come to represent, at least in the minds of many Asians I have spoken to (some coming from Cambridge or Oxford) – foreign interference, in no small part due to the efforts of its most fervent ambassadors.

This is the reason, why the word ‘freedom’ no longer has a positive ring to it. It has become vulgar, thanks to the propagandic bastardisation of the word from certain quarters. When one hears the word ‘freedom’, one no longer thinks of something relatively heartwarming like the liberation of African slaves or the walk through the Red Sea. Instead, the word has come to be associated with the quixotic quest of an ex-alcoholic and his failed search for WMD in Iraq, and needless collateral.

It is the same with Christianity; most people have a relatively good impression of it in Asia (primarily because no one attempts to evangelize with sugar-coated death threats in the East – we are simply too polite).

When they go to the West, relatively liberal Asian Christians (like myself) are shocked to find a sort of fundamentalism and literalistic interpretation that never occurred to them while they were back home.

Then… everything suddenly fits into the bigger picture – the Crusades, the Inquisitions, are no longer isolated historical incidents and aberrations far removed from the present reality, but rather the logical manifestation of a particular thought process that still inflicts and afflicts the world today, and seem a negation rather than a profession of the purest distillation of the type of love that Christ seems to have advocated.

In short, one thinks well of Christianity until one meets some really fanatical fundamentalists. One can entertain positive notions of Islam until one hears or reads about a stoning or a limb amputation that is supposedly thoroughly consistent with Divine Fiat. One entertains good notions about Judaism until one reads about the genocide of the Amelekites, that no amount of rationalisation with your pastor or rabbi, can ameliorate the terror of. Likewise, one thinks well of Science as a methodical approach to understanding the universe until one observes exactly how it is, many scientists really do their work. Accurate conclusions are the exception rather than the norm; but we only hear about the exceptions.

Wang Gungwu

If you don't have a sense of the past, your future will be diminished. Knowing where you come from, where your roots are, and all those great - and terrible - things that happened in the past, strengthens your identity